Harvard Women's Health Watch published this fantastic new article about sinus problems. It explains the roots of the condition, and what you can do about it, in detail, but also in simple language. If you live in this kind of misery, I can't recommend this article and its suggestions highly enough.
It's timely for me for a couple of reasons. One is that I have had a lot of sinus infections in the last year. I've been plagued with them since I was about 12 years old, but I had been able to stave them off for a while in the relatively recent past. More about that in a minute.
Because I don't have health insurance -- I haven't had it in a decade -- I usually go to the clinic at a local drugstore for this kind of illness. There was a new LPN when I was there last month, and she was much more aggressive about her recommendations than the previous nurses have been. I wound up with a new humidifier, a renewed commitment to nasal lavage and Mucinex, and a course of antibiotics.
The funny thing is that I wrote a long, mildly controversial article about nasal lavage -- sinus rinses -- about 15 months ago, but after I wrote the article, I started to neglect the rinses themselves. The preparation can be time-consuming -- cleaning the NeilMed bottle, boiling water, waiting for it to cool, having a clean area to do the rinse itself, etc. If you'd like to read the article, it's here: Cleaning Your Sinuses.
I had waited several years to get a humidifier -- for some reason, I thought it would be too wet for my bedroom, make all the books damp, etc, but that hasn't been the case at all. I'm thrilled to have it now. I don't even seem to mind that it means an extra trip up and down the stairs at some point during the day, when I rinse and refill the water tank. The one I bought is this Vicks Warm Mist model, for about $37. It's kept near the wall 3-4 feet from my bed.
The second reason the article is timely for me is that my mother just had outpatient surgery on her sinuses, and I've been helping her out for about the past 10 days. She's a terrible patient, because she doesn't take the recommendations to stay in bed seriously enough. The first few days were unpleasant, but she's doing much better now.
The whole thing started this past fall when she had a sinus infection that wouldn't go away. Eventually they did some kind of Serious Business scan of her head (CT? fMRI? PET? I don't know) and determined that one of her sinus cavities was completely packed. There were some visits to an ENT and surgeons after that, and it turned out that one whole side of her sinuses had been blocked for most of her life by a deviated septum. The surgeon removed a bone spur and left a stent in for a week.
My mother absolutely refuses to do sinus rinses, because she says the idea makes her gag (she's kind of a delicate flower about stuff like that). I'm wondering how much she'll protest if she continues to be in a state of chronic sinusitis even after the surgery.
The Harvard article was linked from Popgadget, which I've been reading for years. The blogger there commented that it seemed like nasal rinsing was becoming mainstream in the last few years, when before it had been considered a New Age thing (anyone else remember when George on Six Feet Under gave Ruth a neti pot as a gift, and she was mightily annoyed?).
I'd argue that the mainstreaming of sinus rinses has to do with NeilMed distributing its kits as free samples to doctors' offices. My kit came from my boyfriend's mom, who was the lab tech in an office for many years. I've tried a couple of different products of this kind, and NeilMed's Sinus Rinse Regular Kit is the best -- the easiest to use, the most comfortable solution mix, etc.
I'm hilariously evangelistic about this product; add this Harvard article to the list of things I will be gushing about in the future.
(Thanks to Flickr's Bionerd for supporting the Creative Commons with this pic from a sinus scan!)